Paradigms for a metaphorology.pdf - Townsend Humanities Lab

54 Paradigms for a Metaphorology
savages and wildernesses for those who came after them. But this image is merely
the somber rhetorical foil for the words of encouragement that follow: “Nonetheless,
messieurs, let us not lose heart: what do we know of what lies in store for us?
Perhaps there are a thousand secrets still awaiting discovery: when the geographers
have reached the end of their learning, they put vast seas and wild climes in their
maps; but perhaps there are even more riches in these seas and in these climes than
we currently possess.” 3 In the aesthetic realm, we find a parallel to this metaphorical
opening of the horizon of expectations in Lessing’s discussion of a wretched
novel, whose author had lamented in his foreword that “there is nothing new any
more, everything has been used up besides the thirst for novelty.” The reviewer believes
this excuse to be unwarranted: “In the world of poetry a genius will still find
a country that seemed to have been waiting for his discoveries.” 4 We notice just
how characteristic the terra incognita metaphorics is for the kind of ‘intentionality’
of consciousness that marked the early modern period when we reencounter
it in our own century as an expression of scholarly self-assertiveness. When Husserl,
for example, compares the first steps of his phenomenological method with a
coastal landing in a ‘new country’ on which we must now gain a firm footing, 5 or
when, in his late “Crisis” treatise, he characterizes the methodical epochē as “the
gate of entry through which one must pass in order to discover the new world of
pure subjectivity,” 6 this strikes us as indicating a curiously anachronistic self-confidence
that would be more at home at the beginning of our epoch. An investigation
of Husserl’s self-intepretation, in which he repeatedly places himself in Descartes’
position, would confirm this in the most astonishing manner.
Needless to say, no isolated metaphorological investigation can suffice to articulate
the specific feeling for the ratio of the known to the unknown, the old to
the incipiently new, that distinguishes the first centuries of the modern age. An
investigation of this kind can convey only a sense of the pretheoretical, nervously
expectant, premonitory quality of a relation to the world that imagines itself to be
standing on the threshold of an immeasurable increase in knowledge, and that converts
this awareness into perseverance, labor, method, and energy. Metaphors stake
out the terrain within which terminological investigations would have to supply
3. Cependant, Messieurs, ne perdons point courage: que savons-nous ce qui nous est reservé? peut-être y at-il
encore mille secrets cachés: quand les géographes sont parvenus au terme de leurs connaissances, ils placent
dans leurs cartes des mers immenses et des climats sauvages; mais peut-être que dans ces mers et dans ces climats
il y a encore plus de richesses que nous n’en avons. Oeuvres compl., ed. Didot, 560.
4. erbärmlichen Roman . . . es gäbe nichts Neues mehr, es sei alles abgenutzt, außer der Neugierigkeit . . . In
der Welt der Erdichtungen wird ein Genie noch immer ein Land finden, das seinen Entdeckungen aufbehalten
zu sein schien. Berlinische Privilegierte Zeitung (1753), 13. Stück (Werke, ed. Rilla, III, 85).
5. Die Idee der Phänomenologie, Husserliana II (The Hague, 1950), 45–46. [Edmund Husserl, The
Idea of Phenomenology, trans. Lee Hardy (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999), 35.]
6. das Eingangstor, mit dessen Durchschreiten die neue Welt der reinen Subjektivität entdeckt werden
kann. Husserliana VI (The Hague, 1954), 260. [Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and
Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970),
257.]